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Saturday, January 4, 2025
New photo of NGC 281
This photo is made by combining 10 h of new H-alpha exposures to a 10 h of exposures with my older long focal length telescope from 2015. Beside that, there are 5 hours of data taken with Tokina AT-x 300mm f2.8 camera lens back in 2020. Very dim background mist comes mainly from camera lens data.
With 3 h S-II and O-III exposures the total exposure time was 31 hours.
Deep view to the NGC 281
Click for a full size, 2700x2500 pixels
The seeing wasn't very good so I couldn't quite split the two of the stars but it can be seen, that there are two stars very close to each other visually.
sulfur=red, hydrogen=red and oxygen=blue, this combination is very close to a natural color palette.
INFO
NGC 281 is a busy workshop of star formation. Prominent features include a small open cluster of stars, a diffuse red-glowing emission nebula, large lanes of obscuring gas and dust, and dense knots of dust and gas in which stars may still be forming. The open cluster of stars IC 1590 visible around the center has formed only in the last few million years. The brightest member of this cluster is actually a multiple-star system shining light that helps ionize the nebula's gas, causing the red glow visible throughout. The lanes of dust visible below the center are likely homes of future star formation. Particularly striking in the above photograph are the dark Bok globules visible against the bright nebula. Stars are surely forming there right now. The entire NGC 281 system lies about 10 thousand light years distant. (Source, NASA APOD)
With my new imaging system I can get deeper with a good resolution, than my old long focal length toolset was able to. The secondary mirror focusing system takes care of focusing and temperature compensation, I can keep the heavy main mirror locked down all the time. Heavy mirror has a tendency to move a bit when the scope moves and that can mess up the collimation.
The current system keeps collimation perfect all the time.
An other great accessory is the Active Optics Unit from Starlight Xpress. It's as easy to use as any OAG, the good update speed to a 11 mag star is around 8Hz. The AO-unit removes all the minor tracking errors very fast. The Mesu Mount Mark II has a periodic error under four arcseconds and that's a very small error, even so, AO unit gives a better image quality since the corrections are made by moving a light weight piece of glass, the heavy load of the scope and accessories doesn't need to move for corrections.
Structure study of the NGC 281
Please, click for a large image
H-alpha, 30 x 1200 s, binned 1x1 = 10 h (11" Celestron EDGE, shot at 2015)
H-alpha, 15 x 1200 x, binned 1x1 = 5h (Tokina AT-x 300mm f2.8, shot at 2020)
A single calibrated 20 min exposure of H-alpha, Bin 1x1
Saturday, December 21, 2024
Sharpless 132, A Furious Cosmic Horse Gets Blinded by a Divine Blue Light
This is one of my favorite targets in Cepheus, Sh2-132 has an interesting structures due to massive energetic stars in it. I haven't found any explanation to the blue, jet like, structure glowing blue light of ionized Oxygen (O-III), the structure is visible also in H-alpha light.
When I shot firs photos out of this distant object about twenty years ago, I gave a longish name to it, "A Furious Cosmic Horse Gets Blinded by a Divine Blue Light" I don't usually name my photos but with some of them I simply must do so.
This is a kind of high resolution photo taken with my new imaging platform, it covers about 0.7 x0.7 degrees of sky. (Full Moon has an apparent diameter 0,5 degrees) Seeing was very good to my location, FWHM about 1.6 arcseconds, that's rare up here.
Sharpless 132
A Furious Cosmic Horse Gets Blinded by a Divine Blue Light
sulfur=red, hydrogen=red and oxygen=blue, this combination is very close to a natural color palette.
A single calibrated 20 min exposure of H-alpha, Bin 1x1
Sunday, December 15, 2024
New Photo, Sharpless 115 in Cygnus
This Portion of sky covers less than a square degrees of sky in Constellation Cygnus, the Swan.
This star nursery has always looked to me like like it was cut out of the Baroque painting.
I was able to shoot a high resolution data for it with my new imaging setup. The Celestron Edge 14". This telescope has a beautiful optics and with a secondary mirror focuser, it'll hold the collimation perfectly all the time. Normally the heavy main mirror is used for focusing and it can be source of optical problems when it moves due to gravity when the scope is moving and pointing to a different portions of sky.
BAROQUE SKY OF SHARPLESS 115
Click for a full size photo, 2000x2000 pixels
sulfur=red, hydrogen=green and oxygen=blue
Shining with the light of ionized atoms of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen in this Hubble palette color composite image, the nebular glow is powered by hot stars in star cluster Berkeley 90. The cluster stars are likely only 100 million years old or so and are still embedded in Sharpless 115. But the stars' strong winds and radiation have cleared away much of their dusty, natal cloud. At the emission nebula's estimated distance, this cosmic close-up spans just under 100 light-years.
Source: NASA APOD
sulfur=red, hydrogen=red and oxygen=blue, this combination is very close to a natural color palette.
This is my very large mosaic photo of the whole Cygnus, more info about this massive photo
Monday, December 9, 2024
Wizard Nebula, NGC 7380
My new setup has a long focal length optics, Celestron EDGE 14", after years of shooting the wider field astronomical photos, it's very nice to dig in to the details of those cosmic wonders.
My new photo shows the Wizard nebula in Cepheus, I have shot this target many times with a various optical configurations. The combination of 14" telescope and large 12 micron pixels of my "new" second hand camera, Apogee Alta U9000M, delivers an optimal resolution to my seeing conditions (0.91 arcsecond/pixel). This makes possible to go very deep in relatively short cumulative exposure time, as can be seen in this photo. A dim background nebulosity stand out nicely after about six hours of H-alpha exposures.
Click for a full size photo, 2000x2000 pixels
sulfur=red, hydrogen=green and oxygen=blue
Click for a full size photo, 2000x2000 pixels
Click for a full size image.
Thursday, November 28, 2024
Beauty and the Beast, Tulip Nebula and a Black Hole
I started to collect exposures for this photo back in 2014, now I have shot new high resolution material for this amazing target with my new imaging platform.
I see several layers in my photos and that makes them to tell a story beyond any imagination.
First
A visual layer, that's naturally very important to me as a visual artist, revealing the hidden cosmic beauty and poetry is my passion.
Second
The physical layer, how emission of the nebulae works, radiation pressure, nuclear fusion of the star, gravitational phenomes, etc... all that is extremely beautiful in its own class.
Third
An existential layer, where we are coming and where we are going in a cosmic scale.
Practically all of the heavier elements in our bodies are coming from supernova explosion's, iron in our blood, oxygen, carbon, etc... We are children of the stars
When our Sun will die after few billion years and turn to a planetary nebula, it'll vaporize the Earth and our remains on it and blows them to the outer space. After aeons our remains are going to end up to a building blocks for a new generation of stars.
We all have been stars and one day we going to be stars again.
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Tulip Nebula and a Black Hole
Click the photo to see a high resolution photo, it's worth it
sulfur=red, hydrogen=green and oxygen=blue
Black Hole, Cygnus X-1, in a Close Up of the Full Resolution Photo
Click the photo to see a high resolution photo, it's worth it
The complex and beautiful Tulip Nebula, Sharpless 101, blossoms about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation of Cygnus the Swan. Ultraviolet radiation from young energetic stars ionizes the atoms and powers the emission from the Tulip Nebula.
Also in the featured field of view is the black hole Cygnus X-1, which is also a microquasar because it is one of strongest X-ray sources in planet Earth's sky. The powerful jets from the black hole can't be seen in this photo since they glow light in X-ray wave length. Faint bluish curved shock front, visible at up center, is coursed by the X-ray jet when it hits to a interstellar gas and dust.
Why we can see the black hole in this image as a star like object?
We can't see the actual black hole but we can see how the material is twirling in the black hole. The speed become so high that the matter starts to turn to an energy emitting light trough the whole spectrum up to X-ray and gamma radiation.
Photo in Visual Colors
Click the photo to see a high resolution photo, it's worth it
sulfur=red, hydrogen=red and oxygen=blue
A single, full scale, 20 min H-alpha exposure, Bin 1x1
Click for a full scale image.
Click for a full scale image.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Methuselah Nebula, MWP1, project finalized
Click for a full size image
A single, full size, 20 min H-alpha and O-III exposure
Click for a full scale image.
Both images below are jpg photos of a single full size, 20 min. FIT-format 16 bit image.
Photos are calibrated with darks and bias corrected flats and are heavily stretched to show even a hint of the actual nebula.
H-alpha
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
WR 134, The Rising Phoenix
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This is the second light for my new imaging setup, the first light image can be seen HERE
For years I have wanted to shoot a long focal length photo of this amazing mass ejecting star in constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Past five years I have done short focal length imaging with camera optics, now it's time to get closer.
I spent several clear nights to capture light emitted by an ionized elements in this gas formation. (H-alpha, S-II and O-III) For compositional reasons I ended up to a two panel mosaic image. Total exposure time is 23h.
When processing the final image I couldn't be noticing how much this formation looked like a mystical creature, the Phoenix Bird. I rarely use any other than official catalog numbers as a name of my photos but this time I simply had to name this composition to "Rising Phoenix".
When art meets science, the results can be beautiful. It can become something more than either of them on their own can ever be.
WR 134 as a Rising Phoenix
Click for a large image, 2500x1300 pixels photo shows the WR 134 like never seen before.
Info about the WR 134
WR 134 is a variable Wolf-Rayet star located around 6,000 light years away from us in the constellation of Cygnus. It's surrounded by a faint bubble of glowing ionized oxygen, blown out by the intense radiation and fast solar wind from the star. The star has five times the radius of the sun and it's 400,000 times more luminous.
My Wide Field Photo of the Area
Click for a large image, ~2500x2000 pixels
WR 134, the Rising Phoenix in visual spectrum
Click for a large image, ~2500x1300 pixels
Click for a large image
A single, full scale, 20 min O-III exposure
Click for a full scale image.
This is a dim target, 1200s O-III exposure doesn't show much about the O-III formation around the star WR 134.
This is one of the test shots after the collimation procedure. Exposure time is 1200s with 3nm O-III filter. Image is calibrated with Dark Frame and Bias corrected Flat Frame. Target is WR 134 in Cygnus. Stars are pinpoint from corner to corner. Optical analysis of this frame can be found at end of THIS blogpost
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Wednesday, October 9, 2024
FIRST LIGHT FOR MY NEW IMAGING SETUP
After a couple of years I'm able to publish a bran new photo!
This is a first light to my new imaging setup, it took couple of years to get it up and running.
I selected a relatively bright target since I wanted to test the system as soon as possible. The Pelican Nebula in constellation Cygnus, the Swan, is my first target.
The new system has a focal length of 2730mm with a massive 0.7 focal reducer for the Celestron EDGE 14" telescope. The new camera has 12 micron pixel size and it gives me an image scale of 0.91 arc seconds/pixel. (That's perfect for my seeing conditions.) The field of view spans 46.1 x 46.1 arcminutes of sky. (For a scale, Full Moon covers 30x30 arcminutes of sky)
The native resolution of the Apogee Alta U9000M camera is 3056x3056 pixels. I'm using a stacking method that doubles the measures by using the "Drizzle" while imaging. The final image is then 6112x6112 pixels.
Only five hours of light from an ionized hydrogen (H-alpha) is used for this photo. Other two color channels, O-III and S-II, are borrowed from my older long focal length photo of this target taken with Celestron EDGE 11" telescope.
Pelican Nebula
Click the photo to see a 2000x2000 pixel version
Click the image to see a full size version
This photo is in mapped colors from light from an ionized elements, hydrogen = green, sulfur=red and oxygen=blue. (H-alpha, S-II and O-III)
Click the image to see a full size version, 3056x3056 pixels